NES Alumna İpek Kocaömer Yosmaoğlu (Ph.D. 2005) has been elected President-Elect of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association (OTSA). Yosmaoğlu, who is an associate professor of History at Northwestern University, wrote her dissertation, “The Priest’s Robe and the Rebel’s Rifle: communal conflict and the construction of national identity in Ottoman Macedonia” under the direction of Şükrü Hanioğlu. She has written one book, Blood Ties: Religion, Violence, and the Politics of Nationhood in Ottoman Macedonia, 1878-1908 (Cornell University Press, 2015), and edited another, Turkish Jews and Their Diasporas: Entanglements and Separations (Springer, 2022). She has served as the director of the Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Program at Northwestern’s Buffett Institute for Global Affairs since Fall 2019.

Yosmaoğlu is the third consecutive NES Ph.D. to serve as president of OTSA, joining the current president, Baki Tezcan (Ph.D. 2001) and immediate past president Amy Singer (Ph.D. 1989) in this role.